http://metamodular.com/Common-Lisp/lispos.html

in most text books on operating systems, the concept of a process is presented as playing a central role in operating-system design, whereas it ought to be presented as an unfortunate necessity due to the limited address space of existing minicomputers in the 1970s

The problem with a file is that it is only a sequence of bytes with no structure

I really like this!

See also the hackernews discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19746122. I posted links to Symbolics Genera and Domain/OS which are historical systems similar to what is proposed.

Thanks for the reminder to go back to the HN thread. Gained a few great comments since my first look. Looks like one can’t download Virtualbox anymore 😞 (via https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano)

Actually, the original apple file system had a thing called a resource fork, which allowed the file to have a data part, and then it allowed a second partition containing meta-data, which was accessible via a set of records accessed by unique 4 letter codes. This allowed people to store comments about a file without disturbing the file contents. It was a brilliant system, later removed by apple because the internet kept stripping the hidden fork. In a bizarre twist of fate, MS was busy in multi-year effort to copy this feature, and then they pulled the plug, one of the only regrets Bill Gates had was not following through on this improved file system. Thank the stupid Unix file system for blunting the progress away from the archaic unstructured byte stream system, which is a millstone around everyone's neck.

Xattrs anyone?